Opinion: The rich get richer

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Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her third-quarter fundraising numbers -- $27 million, $22 million of it for the primaries. And in an added ‘nyah-nyah’ to Barack Obama, she says she picked up 100,000 new donors. All announced just minutes before Obama was to give his big anti-war speech and dominate the day’s news.

Obama, of course, announced yesterday that he had raised $20 million, $19 million of it for the primaries, and had picked up 93,000 new donors. To date, Clinton has raised $90 million (including about $10 million transferred from her Senate campaign) and Obama $78.9 million. Our colleague, Dan Morain, the money man, has a story on the new numbers here on this site and in Wednesday’s print editions.

As we pointed out yesterday, the ‘cash on hand’ numbers are the important ones. At the end of the second quarter, Clinton had $45 million with $3 million in debt, to Obama’s $36 million, with just under $1 million in debt. This likely will widen that gap, although Clinton appears to have a larger paid staff than Obama in some of the early states, so she could be burning through cash faster than he is.

We likely won’t know until Oct. 15, when the reports are due. (All the numbers through the second quarter are viewable at OpenSecrets.org, which will update as the new reports are filed.)

The key to all this is that the new numbers will reinforce the idea that Clinton is the Democratic front-runner, and that she and Obama have plenty of cash to fight it out through Feb. 5, if that becomes necessary. And that all makes the hill even harder to climb for the other Democratic contenders.

-- Scott Martelle